Wildfire Map Update – SB 83 Still Held Hostage As Sine Die Approaches

As the Oregon legislature nears the end of its 2025 legislative session, the fate of Senate Bill 83A, the fix to the deeply flawed Oregon Wildfire Map, is in serious jeopardy. What once appeared as a bipartisan agreement is now being held hostage by leaders in the Oregon House.

In mid-April the Oregon Senate approved SB 83A, a commonsense solution to eliminate the primary problems caused by the state’s wildfire map.  The bill sailed through the Oregon Senate on a unanimous vote, signaling the bipartisan nature of the compromise.

SB 83A reflects the best of the Oregon legislature – consensus, cooperation, and a solution that everyone can support.

Unfortunately, leaders in the Oregon House of Representatives have decided that they’re not interested in consensus, cooperation, or good policy. Instead, they’ve chosen to hold SB 83A hostage in an effort to force a majority of state representatives to vote to withhold your kicker tax refund. We’ve already written about this previously here: TAKE ACTION: Wildfire Map Repeal Bill Caught in End-Game Politics

Let’s be clear – we agree that there’s a critical need to provide more funding for the state’s wildfire program, especially on efforts to prevent wildfires and to treat landscapes in wildfire prone areas to reduce the spread and damage of wildfire when it starts.

We also support the idea of increasing funding to investigate the causes of wildfires, and to increase punishment for those intentionally causing wildfires.

But the need for funding doesn’t justify efforts to blackmail legislators into voting for a flawed funding solution in exchange for fixing a problem caused by flawed maps. This is particularly true when Oregon senators unanimously agreed that the map needed to be immediately repealed.

Tying the map repeal together with the funding debate is the worst kind of politics, akin to taking rural Oregonians hostage and demanding a ransom to let them go.

If you’re impacted by the maps, understand that there are legislators trying to help you. In fact, there have been two efforts to rescue SB 83A by immediately putting it on the House floor for an up or down vote. If the bill gets to the floor, it will easily pass.

Unfortunately, despite bipartisan support, both efforts to pull the bill directly to the floor have failed. But those efforts will continue.

We still believe SB 83A will eventually pass. But if it doesn’t, the OPOA Legal Center will immediately move forward with the litigation filed earlier this year. You can read about that lawsuit here: Property Owners and Eastern Oregon Counties File Lawsuit Over Wildfire Hazard Map

The opinions expressed in this post are those of the author and do not represent the opinions or positions of any party represented by the OPOA Legal Center on any particular matter.